Of love and sleuthing

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ARTHUR & GEORGE

By Julian Barnes

Knopf, $24.95, 385 pages

Once again, and splendidly, Julian Barnes turns to the life of a great writer to shape a novel.

The Arthur of "Arthur and George," is the toweringly humane Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The George is one George Edalji, a dark-skinned solicitor who, in 1903, was falsely accused of a series of horrendous animal slashings in a farming village north of Staffordshire.

Using letters and newspapers of the time, government reports and court proceedings along with Conan Doyle's own writings, Mr. Barnes imagines the meeting of these two very different men. Traversing the darkest sides of human nature, he builds a tale that marries the elements of a good detective story with a more human story. Conan Doyle is the chief beneficiary in all this, emerging here as a faithful husband, an enthusiastic lover and a protector of the downtrodden.

This is a work of historical fiction, and fans of the highly inventive "Flaubert's Parrot" will no doubt miss some of the experimental bravura of that earlier work. Nevertheless, while this book is attentive to the historical facts of events -- and, some would argue, gets bogged down in them -- it manages to intrigue and delight at a steady clip. Moreover it revisits an injustice that more than deserves a second look.

Like a good detective story the book opens ominously, describing a small boy's encounter with a corpse. That small boy is a dutiful young Arthur who the narrator suspects has been subjected to a cold dose of reality, starting with a door has been purposefully left ajar. The omniscient narrator observes, "There might have been a desire to impress upon the child the horror of death; or more optimistically, to show him that death was nothing to be feared. Grandmother's soul had clearly flown up to Heaven, leaving behind only the sloughed husk of her body. The boy wants to see? Then let the boy see."

Though George does not have a first memory as vivid as Arthur's, as the son of vicar, he early on learns the rules. "[H]e is expected to tell the truth because at the Vicarage no alternative exists.